"Reacting to the Past"- interacting with the
cultures and histories of India and Pakistan

In the Fall semester 2007, Prof. Murphy Halliburton's cultural
anthropology course Peoples of South Asia (Anthropology 208W) used a variety
of writing assignments and pedagogical techniques to interact with the cultures
and histories of India and Pakistan. After an introduction to South Asian
history, the course engaged in a "Reacting to the Past" game (a
type of pedagogical role-playing game developed at Barnard College) called
Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945 in which
students recreated a meeting in Simla, India in 1945 where delegates negotiated
the future of the Indian subcontinent during the waning of the British occupation
of India. Students were assigned to play actual historical roles, such as
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, and
were required to write and orally present papers advocating their proposals
for the future disposition of India.

Students devoted themselves to learning about their roles
through assigned readings and outside research and often stayed long after
class had ended to negotiate political deals with other student-delegates.
Reacting papers were written in the voice of the historical character and
incorporated materials from student readings and research. A group of students
who comprised the delegates of the Indian National Congress party, on their
own initiative, produced additional written documents that presented a platform
and organizational model for a future government of India. They distributed
this proposal to other student representatives in an effort to win them over
to supporting their efforts to maintain a unified Indian state rather than
partitioning the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority
Pakistan. By granting key concessions to Muhammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim
League, the Congress members were successful and their referendum passed resulting
in a single, unified India and no separate state of Pakistan. Many students
were passionate about the game and often continued debating their positions
in character in the hall outside the classroom long after class had finished.

After the Reacting game was completed, students were required
to write more "traditional" academic papers on readings in cultural
anthropology and South Asia studies, such as analyses of the meanings and
implications of the caste system and an ethnographic study of consumption
and social mobility in an Indian village. Since Prof. Halliburton believes
that getting to know a culture should involve not only studying the history
and social practices of a region but should also include engagement with the
sights, sounds and other sensory and embodied aspects of culture, later in
the semester, students wrote what was known as an "aesthetics paper."
In this assignment, students were asked to discuss the visual, gustatory and
aural experiences they encountered during a visit to a South Asian restaurant
and an in-class viewing of a Bollywood movie.

When asked to give their reactions to the various writing assignments, students
explained that one thing they appreciated about the aesthetics assignment
was how it allowed them to interpret their own experience in their writing
as opposed to discussing the research of others, which is ordinarily what
is done in much social science coursework. Students felt this assignment made
their engagement with culture more direct and less disembodied, and one student
explained "you don't forget what you learn [in the aesthetics paper]
because you experienced it." Students felt that they learned a lot from
the more traditional academic essay, but they were able to write a more clearly
focused and communicative paper in describing their personal aesthetic experience.
Prof. Halliburton in his reaction to these assignments found the aesthetics
papers often more articulate than other assignments. The strong point about
papers from the Reacting game meanwhile was that they had an argument that
was more focused and a narrative that was more structured than the assignments
based on readings and lectures. One student felt that the rhetoric in the
Reacting papers involved a "rallying tone" as they attempted to
get a reaction from classmates. The Reacting papers did not, however, engage
with reading materials as thoroughly as the more traditional academic essays.

Overall, it appeared that students benefited from a variety
of styles of writing, and each type of assignment-the Reacting papers, the
aesthetics paper and the traditional social science essay-had its own advantages
in terms of whether it brought out a focused argument in relation to historical
events, a clear articulation of personal experience or a reaction to social
science research on South Asia.